Dr. Dillon (pp. 43–59), following Bickell, has pointed out more or less convincingly the many interpolations made in the book after, and even before, the making of the Septuagint translation, which originally lacked 400 lines of the matter in the present Hebrew version. The discovery of the Saidic version of the LXX text of Job decides the main fact. (See Professor Bickell’s Das Buch Job, 1894.) “It is quite possible even now to point out, by the help of a few disjointed fragments still preserved, the position, and to divine the sense, of certain spiteful and defiant passages, which, in the interest of ‘religion and morals,’ were remorselessly suppressed; to indicate others which were split up and transposed; and to distinguish many prolix discourses, feeble or powerful word-pictures, and trite commonplaces, which were deliberately inserted later on, for the sole purpose of toning down the most audacious piece of rationalistic philosophy which has ever yet been clothed in the music of sublime verse” (Dillon, pp. 45–46).
“Besides the four hundred verses which must be excluded on the ground that they are wanting in the Septuagint version, and were therefore added to the text at a comparatively recent period, the long-winded discourse of Elihu must be struck out, most [? much] of which was composed before the book was first translated into Greek.... In the prologue in prose ... Elihu is not once alluded to; and in the epilogue, where all the [other] debaters are named and censured, he ... is absolutely ignored.... Elihu’s style is toto cœlo different from that of the other parts of the poem; ... while his doctrinal peculiarities, particularly his mention of interceding angels, while they coincide with those of the New Testament, are absolutely unknown to Job and his friends.... The confusion introduced into the text by this insertion is bewildering in the extreme; and yet the result is but a typical specimen of the ... tangle which was produced by the systematic endeavour of later and pious editors to reduce the poem to the proper level of orthodoxy” (id. pp. 55–57). Again: “Ch. xxiv, 5–8, 10–24, and ch. xxx, 3–7, take the place of Job’s blasphemous complaint about the unjust government of the world.”
It need hardly be added here that not only the Authorized but the Revised Version is false in the text “I know that my redeemer liveth,” etc. ([xix, 25–27]), that being a perversion dating from Jerome. The probable meaning is given in Dr. Dillon’s version:—
But I know that my avenger liveth;
Though it be at the end upon my dust,
My witness will avenge these things,
And a curse alight upon mine enemies.
The original expressed a complete disbelief in a future life (ch. xiv). Compare Dr. Dillon’s rhythmic version of the restored text.
What marks off the book of Job from all other Hebrew literature is its dramatic and reflective handling of the ethical problem of theism, which the prophets either evade or dismiss by declamation against Jewish sins. Not that it is solved in Job, where the rôle of Satan is an inconclusive resort to the Persian dualistic solution, and where the deity is finally made to answer Job’s freethinking by sheer literary thunder, much less ratiocinative though far more artistic than the theistic speeches of the friends. But at least the writer or writers of Job’s speeches consciously grasped the issue; and the writer of the epilogue evidently felt that the least Yahweh could do was to compensate a man whom he had allowed to be wantonly persecuted. The various efforts of ancient thought to solve the same problem will be found to constitute the motive power in many later heterodox systems, theistic and atheistic.
Broadly speaking, it is solved in practice in terms of the fortunes of priests and worshippers. At all stages of religious evolution extreme ill-fortune tends to detach men from the cults that have failed to bring them succour. Be it in the case of African indigenes slaying their unsuccessful rain-doctor, Anglo-Saxon priests welcoming Christianity as a surer source of income than their old worship, pagans turning Christian at the fall of Julian, or Christians going over to Islam at the sight of its triumph—the simple primary motive of self-interest is always potent on this as on other sides; and at all stages of Jewish history, it is evident, there were many who held by Yahweh because they thought he prospered them, or renounced him because he did not. And the very vicissitude of things would breed a general skepticism.[35] In Zephaniah (i, 12) there is a specific allusion to those “that say in their heart, The Lord will not do good, neither will he do evil.”